IXIS AEW closes European office fund on €350m

IXIS AEW Europe/Curzon, has completed its third close for the Euroffice Fund with total commitments of €350 million ($455 million), easily surpassing its original target.

The fund is dedicated to French institutional clients and is targeting an internal rate of return of 8 to 9 percent. It has attracted a total of 16 investors.

In an announcement today, the firm said that it had first targeted capital commitments of €250 million.

The fund has been seeded with three assets, two of them in Germany. They are a 20,500 square meter block in Hamburg and the head office of Handelsblatt Newspaper in Dusseldorf. The third property is the Colisee 2 building in Paris. The Hamburg office is located in the Neuer Hunnerposten area near the railway station and was sold by HIH, Hamburgishe Immobilien Handlung. The Handelsblatt property was sold by Doughty Hanson’s real estate arm.

IXIS AEW Europe/Curzon operates 11 offices in the UK and on the continent, including three Central and Eastern European branches in Prague, Budapest and Warsaw.

The firm is investing a Central European core-plus property fund called PBW II Real Estate Fund, the successor to PBW I.

Last month, that fund made its first acquisition, acquiring a Polish shopping center for €85 million. The 40,000 square foot Galeria Pestka is located in Poznan, Poland’s fifth largest city with a population of nearly 600,000. The unfinished project is 70 percent leased to tenants, including the world’s second largest hypermarket chain, Carrefour.